This invention relates to apparatus for locating and manipulating agricultural products and more particularly to a system for electronically locating products by means of a digitized image signal and picking or otherwise manipulating the product in response to the signal.
Most agricultural products are either picked by hand or picked by a machine that clear strips the field, harvesting the plant as well as the fruit or vegetable and limiting the field to a single harvest per growing season. While hand labor can be employed to pick fruits or vegetables on more than one occasion from a given plant, hand labor has its own problems with cost, availability, and reliability of labor.
A machine that is capable of picking fruits or vegetables from plants without destroying the plant is desirable.
Robotic picking devices are not commonly used in the agricultural industry, although robotic manipulators have been used in relatively large scale in manufacturing assembly lines to perform simple tasks such as loading and unloading machines, stacking parts, spray painting and spot welding. These machines generally respond to a set of highly specific program commands wherein the positioning and orientation of the work pieces manipulated are known with considerable precision. The programming of such a manipulator is relatively complicated and the program is useful only if the positioning of the work pieces is held within relatively precise tolerances.
Some attempts have been made to increase the flexibility of such industrial manipulators by the addition of various sensory capabilities. Tactile and auditory capabilities are presently being developed. Additionally, visual capabilities are being developed. Range finding, structured light, and binocular vision techniques have been employed to produce robotic vision systems. However, these systems are not particularly successful in applications requiring identification, location, and orientation of similarily colored objects in a field of vision. Further, the known visual light techniques for vision region analysis require substantial processing time.
A primary object of the present invention is to provide a system that automatically locates an agricultural product and directs a mechanical manipulating device to manipulate the product in some desired manner. Two areas in which the invention is particularly applicable are in the picking of fruits and vegetables in the field and in sorting fruits and vegetables from a conveyor belt or the like in order to eliminate spoiled or rotten fruit.